The Godfather. The Godfather Part II. The Conversation. Apocalypse Now. If Francis Ford Coppola had only made those four movies, he would be universally regarded as the greatest filmmaker of all time. Even as it is, Coppola is still widely known as one of the best to ever do it.
But looking at his output over the forty years since, you have to wonder if he still deserves that level of praise.
To be clear, it’s not like he hasn’t made any good movies since the ’70s. His adaptation of Dracula has its fans, and rightly so. And while nobody talks about Peggy Sue Got Married or The Rainmaker anymore, those were both highly acclaimed and successful movies in their time.
On the other hand, we’ve got The Cotton Club, Jack, Youth Without Youth, and Twixt. To say nothing of the underwhelming Godfather Part III.
Granted, even the best filmmakers will have bombs every once in a while. Even so, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Coppola has outgrown his own relevance. Like his good friend and contemporary, George Lucas, there’s a sense that Coppola is coasting on his own massive success from the 1970s. He seems to think he’s still the revolutionary genius he was when he was 50 goddamn years younger, and there are too many people too choked up on nostalgia to disabuse him of the notion.
Which brings us to Megalopolis, the epic that Coppola wrote, directed, and produced. He funded this with $120 million of his own money, and put together a bigger and stronger cast than Dwayne Johnson with a broken arm. Unfortunately, things kept going downhill from there.
Obviously, COVID was a factor in production, but so was 9/11, this film had been in development hell for so long. And when the film finally got put into production, things were so chaotic that artists resigned from the film en masse. Perhaps most importantly, at no point before, during, or after the process could anybody put together a coherent explanation of what this movie supposedly was. The pitch for this movie begins and ends with Francis Ford Coppola, who’s been coming out with erratic and impolitic interviews during the film’s promotion. That’s not even getting started on the movie’s dismal reception at film festivals before it landed with Lionsgate, who went on to have the most disastrous year any major Hollywood studio has seen in recent memory. And Lionsgate’s own disgraceful management of the film’s press is a significant reason why.
(Though, again, the film was entirely funded by Coppola, and Lionsgate was paid a nominal fee in exchange for distribution. So at least this isn’t another costly disaster for the battered studio.)
But you know what? Maybe the movie doesn’t deserve all the bad press. Maybe the major studios and worldwide conglomerates want to discourage this model of artists independently funding their own projects with total creative autonomy. Maybe we’ve gotten too used to films getting micromanaged and watered down into oblivion. We can’t blame a filmmaker for delivering the kind of clear and unique and uncompromised artistic vision we all keep clamoring for. We certainly can’t blame the cast and crew who wanted to work with Francis Ford Coppola, and with each other.
Hell, Coppola himself is 85 years old. There’s a very real possibility this could be the last film he ever makes. If he wants to go out on his own terms, who could deny him that?
Then I went to see the movie. And halfway through, the theater briefly lost power. Someone in the audience asked if the brownout was part of the movie, and it was a legitimately valid question.
The film takes place in a parallel universe that’s pretty much identical to our own, except that New York City — here called “New Rome City” — has a culture and fashion made in post-modern imitation of Ancient Rome. Presumably, the intention was to draw a symbolic comparison between the USA and Rome, to show the USA as an empire in collapse. That’s only my guess, because the film does pretty much fuck-all with it.
Bad enough that we’ve got such an outlandish setting with virtually zero world-building to support it. On top of that, the film tries to convey all manner of themes pertaining to the rise and fall of empires, the culture of celebrity worship, the passage of time, the conflict of art versus commerce, the conflict of innovation versus tried-and-tested, the relationship of artists with time, and all manner of other concepts.
To be sure, this is not the first film — nor will it be the last — to try and cram five movies’ worth of content into two hours’ runtime. But in a rare and gutsy approach, Coppola tried to accomplish by making a movie that’s totally fucking unhinged.
This movie has no internal logic. This movie has no concept of cause and effect. This movie shows deliberate disregard for such storytelling fundamentals as motivation or setups/payoffs. There are whole storylines in this movie that pop right out of nowhere, take up a huge chunk of screen time, then disappear just as quickly with no effect whatsoever on the remainder of the film.
Case in point: This is a movie in which a character gets shot in the face at point-blank range. We literally see half the character’s face blown off. And the character is still alive, completely healed without any visible scarring only a few scenes later. And as soon as the character’s healed, the plot carries on afterward like nothing happened.
That’s how little this movie cares about sequential storytelling or internal logic. But hey, it turns out you can cram so much more into a movie when you don’t care about what shit you’re throwing at the screen!
Needless to say, describing the plot or premise would be an exercise in futility. Suffice to say that the cast can be divided into three major factions.
On one side is Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), a Nobel-winning super-genius who seeks to rebuild New Rome City into a post-modern utopia with the proprietary Megalon substance he invented. If you’re wondering what Megalon is and what it does, the answer is pretty much “whatever the plot needs”.
On the other side is Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who’s doing his best to stop Cesar’s vision. Why the mayor can’t simply fire the architect, your guess is good as mine. I might add that while Franklyn has more than enough good reason to oppose the use of an experimental substance in rebuilding the city, Franklyn carries a personal grudge — back when Franklyn was a DA, he failed to prove in a court of law that Cesar murdered his late wife.
Moderating the two sides is Franklyn’s daughter (Julia, played by Nathalie Emmanuel), a spoiled socialite who apparently wants to prove she’s smarter than the tabloids give her credit for. To that end, she signs on as Cesar’s aide-de-camp and eventually becomes his love interest. It’s every bit as flimsy and contrived as it sounds.
Then we have the third faction, led by the wealthy banking mogul Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), who is conveniently Cesar’s uncle. Crassus is the grandfather to Clodio (Shia LeBouf), a preening blowhard with delusions of political genius. Oh, and Clodio has a sister (Clodia, played by Chloe Fineman), best friends with Julia.
Elsewhere in the supporting cast, we’ve got Wow Platinum (yes, that’s seriously the character’s name, played by Aubrey Plaza), a backstabbing slut looking to marry rich now that her career as a journalist is on the decline. Laurence Fishburne appears as Cesar’s faithful butler and our narrator. Kathryn Hunter plays Franklyn’s wife. Grace VanderWaal appears as a pop star who’s famously a virgin. Jason Schwartzman and Dustin Hoffman play two of Franklyn’s trusted advisers.
So many talented actors in this movie and every single one gives a career-worst performance. With a movie this demented and a plot so far gone off the rails, it seems like everyone agreed that the best solution was to lean into the lunacy and act heightened as all over-the-top hell. And seriously, with this garbage script, there was no other viable course of action.
My favorite example: “Revenge is best while you’re wearing a dress.” Hand to God, that is an actual line in this movie. Shia LeBeouf was tasked with delivering that line while scratching out a name in a literal goddamn burn book, and yes, he’s inexplicably wearing a dress the whole time. And all I could think was “At least this time, somebody had the good sense not to cast Jared Leto.”
The editing is also pathetically bad. I know it’s hard to tell, with all the bizarre trippy shit getting thrown at the screen, the defiant lack of internal logic, the utterly abysmal pacing, and the incoherent plot. But even with all of that, we still get these weird little moments that somehow made it into the final edit. Shia LeBeouf once again gets my favorite example, in a shot where he simply says “Hired help.”
That’s it. Shia LeBeouf simply says “hired help.” There’s no apparent reason, cause, or effect. That’s the beginning, middle, and end of the shot. No context whatsoever. That’s some next-level bad editing.
There’s no denying that Megalopolis is a bad movie. Even so, I’d be willing to consider that the film is secretly a masterpiece because at least it’s bad in an interesting way. It’s bad in a unique way. It’s bad in a way that shows genuine thought and effort. There’s definitely some kind of method to the madness here.
I’m genuinely interested to see how or if this film gets re-evaluated after Coppola dies. We’re gonna need about ten or twenty years to accurately judge whether this film really was a work of misunderstood genius far ahead of its time. After all, Speed Racer was another movie that got panned left and right for its mindless spectacle and over-the-top heightened bugfuckery, and that movie’s gotten favorably re-appraised in recent years.
Then again, it certainly helps that Speed Racer told a coherent story that was trackable from start to finish. And of course it makes a difference that the film had no delusions of cinematic greatness or Academy gold.
I expect that Megalopolis will find its audience on home video, and time will tell how awful and misunderstood it really is. But for right now — as the holidays approach and the multiplexes are only getting more flooded with promising new films — this is a hard pass.